I suppose it depends on what you consider large. At the moment my team is 3 who are doing daily work, and a few more that do more intermittent work. I'd consider that to be small.
I have in the past worked on larger teams (~15 developers), that project used svn and we never seemed to really run into any issues even though we had branches for mainline dev work, and support branches for each "released" version. I'd get the occasional conflict to resolve but it generally wasn't too bad, and I get those with Git also.
I've never worked on a project where dozens or hundreds of remote developers were contributing, but I'd say that outside of a small number of high-profile open-source projects, most people don't. I understand that's what git was built for; maybe that's why all those features just seem like overkill for anything I've never worked on.
I guess 'large' is really a function of number of developers and rate and diversity of commits. I've been in a few situations where two or three of us were putting out several changes to the same piece of code rapidly (typically to meet a deadline). Git has proven invaluable in untangling some of the knots we've put ourselves into in those sorts of situations. If commits are coming in slowly, with plenty of notice, and everyone is working on different parts of the codebase, then you probably won't need to do much fancy stuff very often.
I have in the past worked on larger teams (~15 developers), that project used svn and we never seemed to really run into any issues even though we had branches for mainline dev work, and support branches for each "released" version. I'd get the occasional conflict to resolve but it generally wasn't too bad, and I get those with Git also.
I've never worked on a project where dozens or hundreds of remote developers were contributing, but I'd say that outside of a small number of high-profile open-source projects, most people don't. I understand that's what git was built for; maybe that's why all those features just seem like overkill for anything I've never worked on.